Five Respected Colleges, One Ivy League, Under Fire For Covering Up Sexual Assault On Campus

According to LA Weekly, 37 current and former students at Los Angeles' Occidental College (President Obama's alma mater), backed by uber-lawyer Gloria Allred and a number of female faculty members, have slammed the school with two federal charges for downplaying, mishandling and hushing up allegations of campus rape. One sophomore girl who was sexually assaulted by a student who wound up being guilty of two other rapes was allegedly told that she might have to stay in the dorms with her attacker because her case "wasn't that serious." (The punishment for this repeated rapist? He was briefly suspended, but will return to the school in December. What the fuck?)

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Occidental President Jonathan Veich was a large reason for the dismissive attitude towards sexual assault on campus. Apparently under his reign, the administration's position on the matter was, according to the Times' estimation, that "mostly female victims were exaggerating a sexual encounter they allowed to unfold, or wrongly describing aggressive sexual play during drinking." However, 2012 research in the Journal of Violence and Victims has found that 90 percent of campus rapes are perpetrated by repeat offenders who deliberately target specific women, which kinda throws his misogynistic uneducated stance out the window. One female professor reports students who were victims of sexual assault approaching her after they had been disappointed and hurt by the administration's response to their case, which often included vigorous questioning and skepticism.

According to LAPD statistics, only three rapes out of Occidental have been reported in the last two years. Unfortunately, Occidental isn't the only American college who has disappointed its female community in such a severe way. Allred has announced that students from USC, UC Berkeley, Swarthmore and Dartmouth also allege that university officials had patronized them and covered up the sexual assault charges they'd reported, making it clear that the campus rape epidemic is largely due to administrative response. Rather, lack thereof.

Ugh. My little sister is going to college next year. Great job, everybody.